"The Cognitive Revolution"
00:43:53 · Nathan Labenz
Like, the only thing that matters now is people who will cause us to do something differently than we used to do it. There's just not that many of those roles. Right? Like, it's... How many people are you gonna have before you're just not gonna find that many more people that are gonna change the way you're gonna do things? It's like, that's just extreme... And that's also just not what people have been really developed for. You know? There's, of course, been, like, lip service given over time to the idea that good ideas can come from anywhere within companies. But, you know, the the up to potentially 25% of people who might soon be departing Microsoft, like, they primarily have not made their way there by causing the company to do something fundamentally different than it was otherwise gonna do. Right? They've made their way there by, like, executing tasks. Know. We just don't... I don't... I just don't see how so many people are going to pivot from task completion to, like, counterfactual, you know, we wouldn't have done this but for your unique Snowflake contribution. It's tough. I mean, how many people work in sales? Like, he's basically attacking all of sales. Prakash had a leading indicator for what the labs will ship next. Everything in it is his account.
00:45:19 · Prakash Narayanan
[00:45:19] S6: I'm in some WhatsApp groups for data brokers. And so the data brokers put out requests, requests for data. And essentially, whatever requests for data they're doing now, in about twelve months, that's gonna hit the product. So you can basically see the trajectory, because what these guys do is that they will go and they will buy up data from a company, and then they will take that data and they will create these training playgrounds for agents, and then those agents will learn in that training playground, and then that becomes product in the Frontier lab in about twelve to eighteen months. The labs are buying up entire company's data. So what I imagine is gonna happen in like twelve months, is they will give you a company in a box. You can buy yourself very easily, probably in like six months, you can buy yourself a drop shipping company in a box. Add capital, add one idea, I wanna focus on this, go. And it will do all of the Shopify ing, the advertising, the analysis, the market entry, the customer service, the returns, end to end. And you have a small number of decisions that come back to you, right? I can easily imagine someone running 10 of these kind of companies, but this idea to commercialization gap is enormous. It's enormous in sciences, it's enormous when you go to university like Stanford and you see the ideas, but you don't see them commercialized. And what I'm hoping is that you basically get the agents do the commercialization for you, which is kind of like the gritty entrepreneurial work that used to take a lot of time, calling up like... Calling up Walmart, getting to see the guy to show them your product, raising capital, etcetera. A lot of these things are driven by metrics anyway. A lot of these yes, no decisions at firms which are gonna make these investments are driven by metrics, number one, and number two vibes. You can supply the vibes. Like the metrics, maybe the AIs can supply the metrics. Right? Like, why do you need to be the one that supplies the metrics? Right?
00:47:31 · Nathan Labenz
[00:47:31] S0: What I do expect is certainly a ton of these one person companies, a ton of cool ideas that never got to exist before. So I think we'll see a lot of these things, but I just don't see how there can be enough of these little niches to take... You know, to absorb all the people that used to be driving cars, you know, doing tasks. I've been, you know, limited in my vision before. I think my... If we dig up my old comments on Arena, they will reflect perhaps too limited of a vision. But I do still struggle to see this working in a way that's not majorly disruptive. Prakash's counter was restaurants. Family restaurants died on thin margins. Robot kitchens would make them profitable, and so you would get more of them. We can only eat so much food. Right? This is the thing where it's like, at the end of the day, I'm only gonna eat so many calories. The... You know, you're describing a world where all the restaurant... This is the classic, like, we lose money on everyone and make it up on volume, but, like, brought to employment. Like, all the restaurants will massively cut their staff and replace their kitchen workers with robots, but we'll have a lot more restaurants. Like, I just don't see the math working out on that given the fact that, like, if there's a... There may be a lump of labor fallacy, but I'm pretty sure the lump of food principle is, like, roughly right. You know, I... I'm only gonna eat so many calories and, like, at some point, that is just plain saturated. Right? I don't I don't see the, like, we we have to pause at a world where I'm somehow, like, eating from, like, five different restaurants for every meal or something to get to the point where... I don't know. Maybe my vision is too limited. That could be kinda cool, I suppose.
00:49:11 · Prakash Narayanan
[00:49:11] S6: But you are right. You know, I I don't think the human consumption is really where the growth is. The growth is always gonna be in the AI consumption going forward, as you can see. So you have this concentric circle of the economy, and the AI economy is always the one going to be expanding faster. So anything that supplies into the AI economy is the thing that is going to grow. Anything that supplies into the human economy is gonna be, I think, on the on the down drift, except for status. So I think I think, you know, Peter Thiel has come out with like the relational economy. Alex Alex Imas also at, I think, OpenAI right now on the relational economy. So, yeah, that that could be that could be a big, like, thing. But, again, status economies are not meritocratic. So we have we have tended not to like these status economies because they are not meritocratic. And so that that, I think, has more social repercussions perhaps.
00:50:06 · Nathan Labenz
[00:50:06] S0: It it sounds more dystopian than utopian to think that, like, the bulk of human activity will go into status games, I have to say. I'm like a bear on employment, bullish on people's ability to find meaning in absence of employment, I think, well, certainly relative to most. I really think way too many people in the AI policy space forget or maybe never even realized that, like, a huge portion of people are working to live and not really tying up their identity or their sense of self worth with their work in the way that, you know, the the academic or, you know, intellectual class tends to. So I'm I'm more bullish that, like, people will find things to do that will make them happy. Part five, 5 to 10¢. Michael Freeman is senior director of threat research at ServiceNow. His team watches AI agents attack companies, and he has spent his career finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. I asked what he makes of the current moment.
00:51:16 · Michael Freeman
[00:51:16] S5: It's been a very fast, rapid development. Back in July or end of July, I was speaking to reporters about watching AI agents attack companies. And at the time, all other companies were telling these reporters, it looks just like script kiddies right now. It's just a bunch of noise. And I said, Well, it's evolving fast. Give it a couple of months and we're gonna see some very sophisticated attacks coming from these agents. And know, look in the past two weeks, that's exactly what we're seeing. We're seeing AI development for offensive capabilities that perform at a scale I would say of a very competent APT teams right now. It is, you know, still noisy. I won't say it's very sophisticated and covering its tracks, but I'll definitely say when you take a look at the way they work, they are very competent of adapting and learning the environment and the technologies very well When we take a look at what's happening, especially in Southeast Asia, with the agentic attacks that are happening there in the past two weeks, we were able to identify it costs nowhere between 5 to 10¢ to compromise a company now. So we're actually seeing AI agents more so different frameworks being developed rapidly in FORT and new capabilities being added very quickly. It looks like it's AI actually adding these new capabilities into these frameworks. So it's going from very targeted, smart web based attacks to compromising the environment, pivoting, looking for credentials and ticketing systems, things like that, once it identifies that, then does active directory attacks. So we have seen 3,000 to 4,000 on average attacks successfully in the past two weeks targeting a lot of Southeast Asian companies.